The Golden State claims the breathtaking Route 1 down the Big Sur coastline. The Hawaiian island of Maui has the twisting Hana Highway. And Maine boasts the sublime Acadia National Park Loop along the rugged Atlantic Ocean.

But Wisconsin’s Highway 35 on the Great River Road — a National Scenic Byway — bested them all last year in a Huffington Post poll that asked readers to choose the “prettiest drive” in the United States.

Spanning 250 miles from the town of Prescott in the north past the small burgs of Potosi and Kieler in the south, this route is marked with green signs bearing a steamboat wheel. It runs down the Badger State’s western flank through dozens of sometimes quirky and artsy little towns, offering stunning views of tree-clad limestone bluffs, soaring eagles and, of course, the Mighty Mississippi rolling slowly down to the Gulf of Mexico.

A stretch of the Great River Road near Maiden Rock, Wisc.Bruce Hecksel

Created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938, the 2,500-mile-long Great River Road is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. (I have a conflict of interest because I now live in Wisconsin, but for my money no section of it is lovelier than the section that runs through the Upper Midwest.)

I first traveled along this laid-back gorge — which is 600 feet deep and one to three miles wide in some sections — in the early 1960s, driving north from eastern Iowa with my family (five kids and parents) packed into our red Ford station wagon. We stopped at overlooks for picnics, visited state parks filled with animal-shaped effigy mounds built by Native Americans perhaps a thousand years ago, and bought rounds of Swiss and cheddar at “cheese factories” that were key parts of small Wisconsin dairies.

Those trips left an indelible impression, one I’m reminded of each time I cross the Mighty Mississippi at Dubuque on my way to visit my elderly mother in the Hawkeye State.

Called the “misi-ziibi” by the Ojibwe, this mighty stream slices through the Driftless Area, a rumpled section of the Upper Midwest that — unlike much of the region — escaped being flattened by glaciers that receded 10,000 years ago.

As the ice to the north melted, huge lakes spanning hundreds of miles were formed. When what was left of the glaciers at the southern ends of those lakes collapsed, floods of biblical proportions resulted, helping to create the Upper Mississippi along the Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois borders.

Al Lorenz, chairman of the Wisconsin Mississippi River Parkway Commission, grew up near La Crosse and has driven Highway 35 hundreds of times.

“I never tire of it,” said Lorenz, 72, who worked around the state but retired back to his old stamping grounds.

He said residents of the Twin Cities have long known of the beauty of the Great River Road, while many residents of central and eastern Wisconsin have only been to explore it in the past decade. And outside of the Midwest, few know of its charms.

“I think it was something of an underappreciated slice of our state for people from around Madison and especially Milwaukee,” he said. “Obviously, the Twin Cities are a lot closer.